"Forever.
Second, two lives. 3. Three beings and all things ......"The development and change of things always follow the process from simple to complex, and the development of Chinese characters is no exception. Basic strokes such as horizontal, vertical, apostrophe, and 捺 are the basis of Chinese characters, and thousands of Chinese characters in use today are composed of them, and their origin should be talked about starting with numbers.
In the early days of human society, people lived in primitive groups, and the subsistence materials were distributed to everyone in the group by the elders of the tribe. They will arrange the prey they have hit neatly, and use the help of sticks, ropes and other items to indicate the number of prey in a one-to-one correspondence. Figure 1 illustrates the evolution of the numbers "one, two, and three". The process of distributing food in ancient times was a mathematical process from figurative to abstract, which was also the direct cause of the creation of numbers. We call the simple numbers "one, two, and three" "Jihua numbers", and this kind of word-making method is called "Jihua Word-making", that is, Chinese characters created by stacking strokes. From ancient times to the present, the three characters "one, two, and three" have not changed much, and they also define the standard of "horizontal painting" in Chinese character strokes.
The ancients believed that "three" was not only a number, but also represented everything, so the numbers after "three" were changed shapes. The character "four" is shown in the figure below, its oracle bone inscription is still a number, and the writing method of the gold inscription and the small seal is obviously different from the oracle bone inscription, because the ancients used a new method of word-making when creating the word "four" - the fake borrowing method, which is a method of borrowing homophones to express the new meaning. The small seal of the word "four" is written like the appearance of gasping and exhaling with the nose, which is the original meaning of the word "four", because the pronunciation of the word "four" is similar to the sound of gasping and exhaling with the nose, so the ancients borrowed the word "four" instead of the four horizontal paintings in the oracle bone inscription, and its original meaning disappeared. In the regular script stage, the round pen of the "four" character became a square pen, and it became what it is now.
The number "five" is still a multi-picture number, as shown in the figure below, the ancients also used five horizontal drawings to represent "five", and later they felt that five horizontal drawings were too cumbersome, so they placed two wooden sticks crossed, so as to represent "five". The "five" character of the small seal is like an hourglass, and it is also changed according to the appearance of the oracle bone inscription. The Tang Dynasty calligrapher Ouyang Xun Kaishu has some differences between the "five" character and the "five" used now, he wrote the horizontal fold of the third stroke into a curved shape, because he followed the writing method of seal script, so that the two strokes in the middle still maintain a kind of intersecting relationship, this way of writing gives people a sense of simplicity.
The words "six, seven, eight, and nine" were originally unrelated to numbers, and they were all borrowed by the ancients using homophones. The oracle bone inscription of the character "six" (shown in the picture below) is more like a simple thatched house (thatched house), because the pronunciation of "six" and "lu" is similar, the ancients borrowed it to represent the number "six".
The word "seven" in the oracle bone inscription is more like the word "ten" in use today, which originally meant cutting something with a knife, and it is actually an ancient word for "cut". Because the number "seven" is pronounced similarly to "cut", "seven" is borrowed to represent a number. In order to distinguish the word "seven" from the word "ten", the ancients modified the word "seven", so the small seal writing method changed the original vertical painting into a curved stroke, and then after the standardization of the official script and regular script, "seven" finally became the current state.
The word "eight" is shown in the figure below, the writing of the oracle bone inscription is very close to the current "eight" character, from these two contradictory curved pens can guess the original meaning of the word "eight" is "separate", it is the ancient character of the word "pickpocket". Because the pronunciation of the number "eight" and the character "扒" are the same, the character "eight", which was originally regarded as a separate word, has been transformed into a number, and its two curved strokes have finally become the two basic strokes of Chinese characters, "apostrobutrophe" and "捺".
"九" is an ancient word for "elbow", as shown in the image below, the "nine" in the oracle bone inscription resembles a curved arm. Because the pronunciation of "nine" and "elbow" is similar, the ancients borrowed "nine" as a number.
When the ancients created the number symbols of "six, seven, eight, and nine", they combined figurative things with abstract symbols, which was a very clever move to simplify the shape of Chinese characters and help memorize the pronunciation of Chinese characters.
China has been using the "decimal" notation method since a long time ago, because "ten" is a new order of magnitude, so whenever the number accumulates to "ten", it returns to "one", and the ancients changed the horizontal placement of the wooden stick to the vertical placement or tied a knot on the hanging rope to represent "ten", so the earliest "ten" character appeared, it was written as a vertical painting, as shown in the figure below. Later, in order to distinguish it from the word "one", the ancients changed the bold part in the middle of the word "ten" into a horizontal, and the word "ten" became what it is now. The character "ten" in the oracle bone inscription can also be seen as the oldest "vertical" painting.
The ancients took great pains to create the number symbols from "one" to "ten", paying attention to the simplification of Chinese character writing and taking into account the relationship between Chinese characters and pronunciation, so that these classic number symbols became the basis for learning Chinese characters.